Keen On

Working on Sheryl Sandberg’s team at Google, Megan Hellerer - who had just graduated top of her Stanford class - was on the fast track to become a young Silicon Valley superstar. A few years later, however, she had a breakdown and quit. Describing herself as an “underfulfilled overachiever”, she writes about this traumatic experience in her new book, Directional Living. Hellerer - who now runs her own career coach consultancy and includes Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a client - confesses that at Google she wasn’t living her life and thus was miserable. Her answer to what she calls the traditional “destinational thinking” of career development is in “directional living” - a concept that replaces the “achievement lie” with a more authentic and less quantifiable path to personal fulfillment. Megan Hellerer is a career coach and the founder of Coaching for Underfulfilled Overachievers. She has led hundreds of women, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to transform their lives by tran

Earlier this week, I interviewed the Australian AI expert Toby Walsh about Google’s new NotebookLM, a seemingly magical AI product that creates believable conversation between bots. Today, on our weekly That Was The Week tech roundup, Keith Teare and I agreed that this is going to profoundly change the way we not only produce media, but also how we imagine “trust” and “truth” in our synthetic media age. Referencing an optimistic essay by @Every CEO Dan Shipper entitled “Generalists Own the Future”, we agreed that products like NotebookLM will create what Shipper calls a “wicked environment” for generalists to create their own unique content. GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5 and the other LLMs means that we all have “10,000 Ph.D.’s available at our fingertips.” While that’s exciting news for know-nothing generalists like Keith and I, it’s less good news for all those narrow Ph.Ds beavering away in research libraries In the age of AI, these types of narrow specialists are the new proletariat. Luddites will, of cou

Last year, Michael Scott-Baumann, author of The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine and a peace activist at the Balfour Project, came on the show to talk about the problem to end all problems - the Israel-Palestine question. Today, Scott-Baumann explains, this problem has, if anything, metastasized into something even more shameful and insoluble. Gaza has been transformed from what he calls “the world’s largest outdoor prison” into a war zone and the two sides are no nearer what the Balfour Project calls “peace with justice, security and equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis.” Given this deeply depressing situation, it’s essential that analysts like Scott-Baumann keep giving us the bad news. There is nothing to be cheerful about here. The situation, Scott-Baumann reminds us, is unrelentingly bad. And it is likely to get considerably worse. Michael Scott-Baumann is a graduate of Cambridge University and has an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He has 35 years’ experience a

The AI revolution, long in hype but short in practice, is finally beginning to happen. In today’s WSJ, the tech writer Joanna Stern introduces her own Joannabot to review the new iPhone 16. Soon, of course, we will increasingly struggle to distinguished between the real Joanna and her Joannabot. And the same will also be true for yours truly on KEEN ON who will, in the not too distant future, be easily replicated (ie: replaced) by an Andrewbot. That, at least, is the view of Toby Walsh, one of the world’s most respected AI experts and authors. As Walsh explained to me (the real AK), he’s been playing around with Google’s new NotebookLM, a break-through product which, he says, amazed him as much as his reaction to GPT3. Toby is right. NotebookLM is an astonishingly good product which, in the not too distant future, will make most podcasters like myself redundant. My only consolation is that my wife works for Google. And she, I’m proud to say, is impossible to replicate. Toby Walsh is Scientia Professor of Arti

This is the final episode of a trilogy of critical conversations about the digital revolution. Earlier this week, Gary Marcus explained how to tame Silicon Valley’s AI barons. Then Mark Weinstein talked to us the reinvention of social media. And now we have the former member of the European Parliament & current Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, Marietje Schaake, explaining how we can save democracy from Silicon Valley. In her provocative new book, Tech Coup, Schaake explains how, under the cover of “innovation,” Silicon Valley companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power from governments themselves. So what to do? For Marietje Schaake, in addition to government regulation, what we need is a radical reinvention of government so that our political institutions have the agility and intelligence to take on Silicon Valley.Marietje Schaake is a Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and at the Institute for Human-Centered AI. She is a columnist for the Financial T

And still they come. Every week, it seems, there’s a new book celebrating resistance to Nazism. The latest is Two Wheels to Freedom, Arthur J. Magida’s true story of Cioma Schonhaus, a 20 year-old Jewish art student in Nazi Berlin who successfully forged papers for hundreds of Jews. Yes, of course, Magida’s new book is, in part, about the triumph of human agency in fighting the evils of Nazism. But as Magida - who has written two other acclaimed books about resistance to Nazi Germany - explains, the story of Cioma Schonhaus can also be read as a parable of contemporary America. If Trump does indeed win the November election and begin deporting millions of people, Magida argues, then we might all have a moral obligation to mimic Cioma Schonhaus and become heroic resisters ourselves. Arthur J. Magida has been nominated for a Pulitzer and won multiple awards. His last two books—Code Name Madeleine (“absolutely gripping,” “tightly plotted”) and The Nazi Séance (“an astonishing story, brilliantly told,” “haunting,

Early social media pioneer Mark Weinstein is deeply disturbed by the current state of social media. He’s not alone of course, but in his new book, Restoring Our Sanity Online, Weinstein lays out what he boasts is a “revolutionary social framework” to clean up social media. The book comes with blurbs from tech royalty like Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Steve Wozniak, but I wonder if Weinstein, in his attempt to right social media through a more decentralized Web3 style architecture , is trying a fix yesterday’s problem. In tech, timing is everything and the future of online sanity, as Gary Marcus noted a couple of days ago on this show, will be determined by our ability to harness AI. Rather than social media, that’s what we now need a revolutionary framework to protect us from. MARK WEINSTEIN is a world-renowned tech entrepreneur, contemporary thought leader, privacy expert, and one of the visionary inventors of social networking. His adventure in social media has lasted over 25 years through three award-winning p

Yesterday, KEEN ON featured a conversation with the technologist Gary Marcus about how we can ensure that AI works for us. Today, on our regular That Was The Week tech weekly roundup, Andrew and Keith Teare discuss the role of human agency in determining our tech future. For Keith, optimism in itself is what he calls a “false God”. It’s not enough just to hope for a better future, he reminds us, echoing Gary Marcus, but we all have a responsibility to go out and build it. Perhaps. But as Andrew reminds us, our supposedly common future is vulnerable to the whims of imminent trillionaires like Elon Musk whose wealth and power is now eclipsing most of the world’s nation-states. Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He writes regularly for Tech

Few artificial intelligence experts have been as outspoken or prescient as the author and entrepreneur Gary Marcus. In his new book, Taming Silicon Valley, Marcus takes on the new AI barons of Silicon Valley - billionaires like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman who are building an AI future that works for them rather than for the rest of us. In technology, Marcus argues, human agency is all important. So Marcus’ new polemic seizes back the mantle from these Silicon Valley barons on its insistence that AI must work for us.GARY MARCUS is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience. An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of six books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kl

As Donald Trump’s 79 year-old Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross was the oldest first-time Cabinet appointee in American history. Ross’ mom, however - Agnes, a lifelong New Jersey schoolteacher and proud Democrat - probably wouldn’t have been proud of her boy. As he acknowledges in his new memoir, Risks and Returns, Agnes always wanted her son to attend law school and was far from thrilled when Wilbur, then known on Wall Street as the “King of Bankruptcy,” became associated with Trump over one of his notorious bankruptcies. But as Wilbur confessed to me, he’s still thinking, at the grand old age of 86, of making Agnes proud by going back to law school. Although, of course, that plan might be waylaid if Trump is, indeed, elected in November and invites the Wall Street financier back into his administration. Before being named President Trump’s secretary of commerce in 2017, Wilbur Ross had already earned a reputation as the “King of Bankruptcy” over his 55-year career on Wall Street. Often working on high-pr

At the debate last night, Kamala Harris opened her remarks by talking about the need for America to fix its housing crisis. And crisis it is, at least according to Jerusalem Demsas, a staff writer at The Atlantic who has written extensively on the increasing scarcity and rising cost of American housing. In her new collection of essays, On the Housing Crisis, Demsas suggests that the best way to confront this crisis is to aggressively construct new housing. Build Baby Build, in other words. And, for Demsas at least, the sooner the better.Jerusalem Demsas is a staff writer at The Atlantic where she is an established voice on the housing crisis and local democracy. Her writing spans issues from infrastructure, labor economics, and federalism to race, gender, mobility and the politics of exclusion. She was recognized for her work in 2023 by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) with the ASME Next Award for journalists under 30. Demsas is also a Visiting Fellow with the Center for Economy and Society at

At the debate tonight, there probably won’t be much talk about American education. Which is a shame - at least according to Josh Cowen, author of The Privateers, a new book about how radical conservative billionaires like Betsy De Vos have created a culture war to sell their idea of school vouchers. It’s all part of the right-wing Project 2025 vision, Cowen suggests, of collapsing the church-state boundaries and making American public schools mirror the country’s inequities and injustices. The alternative, Cowen suggests, is for Federal or State governments to fund these public schools more generously, thereby allowing all Americans to get a fair and decent education. Josh Cowen is a nationally recognized expert and writer on topics related to school choice, teachers and teaching, policy analysis, and education politics. He has studied school vouchers, school accountability, charter schools, and parental decision-making as part of major research teams in Louisiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. His writing on sch

The Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic is one of the world’s leading authorities on inequality. In this KEEN ON America conversation, we talked about Milanovic’s interpretation of the history of American economic inequality - from slavery to contemporary capitalism. Why has America become so much unequal over the last fifty years, I asked. And today, in what Milanovic sees as a post neo-liberal age, how does he imagine the future of economic inequality?Branko Milanovic obtained his Ph.D. in economics (1987) from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia. He served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years, leaving to write his book on global income inequality, Worlds Apart (2005). He was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington (2003-2005) and has held teaching appointments at the University of Maryland (2007-2013) and at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at

The Brooklyn based Rafil Kroll-Zaidi is a Princeton educated reporter formerly on the editorial staff of Harper's Magazine. And he is another kind of reporter too - a citizen- sleuth who makes six figures annually by reporting polluting trucks in New York City. Writing about this experience for New York magazine, Kroll argues that, in theory, at least, it’s a “win-win” for both himself and the environment. In practice, however, as he confesses, things aren’t quite as black and white when it comes to making a decent living as a reporter of idling trucks on the streets of New York City. Rafil Kroll-Zaidi is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and has been writing the journal’s popular Findings column, among other features, since 2007. Graham Roumieu is the author and illustrator of the celebrated Bigfoot “autobiographies” In Me Own Words, Me Write Book, and I Not Dead. His drawings appear in such publications as the Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, and the Walrus.Named as one of the "100

Last Saturday, on our regular That Was The Week tech roundup, Keith Teare and I discussed the French decision to imprison Telegram founder Pavel Durov. Today, we discuss the theoretical imprisonment of Elon Musk, an idea touted yesterday by Robert Reich in The Guardian. Elon Musk, according to Reich, is “out of control” and one way to “rein him in” is to “threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X”. Lock him up, in other words. For Keith Teare, this reflects the increasingly authoritarian nature of American progressives like Reich. Perhaps. But, as we discuss today, the social media mogul Musk is a different kind of beast from 20th century media owners. So reining him in probably requires different strategies from those that tried make moguls like Rupert Murdoch or William Randolph Hearst accountable for the lies and hate spewed by their newspapers and tv stations. Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelera

Last month we ran an interview with the Oregon based regenerative wine maker Mimi Casteel about fixing America one sip at a time. In addition, we recorded a KEEN ON America segment with Casteel about her life-long love affair with the American land. Filmed at her family’s beautiful Hope Well Winery, Casteel spoke with an infectious passion about the natural beauty of America. However you think about the current state of the United States, you’ll be inspired by Mimi Casteel’s faith in the regenerative quality of American nature and its land. Strongly recommended. Mimi Casteel is the daughter of Ted Casteel and Pat Dudley, co-founders of Bethel Heights Vineyard. Growing up working in the vineyard and winery, Mimi gained such an appreciation for the industry that she promptly left home after high school. Armed with a BA in History and Classics from Tulane University, Mimi spent the next year working in various National Forests across the west. Her adventures fueled her passion for studying botany, forestry, and

Andrew Leigh is a minister in the Australian parliament with a doctorate in economics from Harvard. Unlike many academic economists, however, Leigh has the gift of simplifying economics for all of us. His new book, How Economics Explains the World, presents economics as the prism to understand the human story. From the dawn of agriculture to AI, Leigh tells the story of how ingenuity, greed, and desire for betterment have, to an astonishing degree, determined humanity’s past, present, and future. Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, Treasury and Employment, and Federal Member for Fenner in the Australian Parliament. Prior to being elected in 2010, Andrew was a professor of economics at the Australian National University. He holds a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard, having graduated from the University of Sydney with first class honours in Arts and Law. Andrew is a past recipient of the Economic Society of Australia's Young Economist Award and a Fellow of the Australian Academy o

Formerly Le Monde’s guy in Jerusalem, Piotr Smolar is now the senior correspondent for Le Monde in Washington, DC. He is also the grandson of Hersh Smolar, one of the 20th century’s more remarkable men. As Smolar notes in Bad Jew, the astonishing story of his grandfather’s life from Stalin’s Russia & the Minsk Ghetto to Netanyahu’s Israel, there was, in fact, nothing particularly bad about Hersh Smolar. What was bad was history - the genocidal forces in Nazi Germany & the Soviet Union which Smolar fought against - both as an anti-fascist soldier and as a Polish communist. And then there’s the Jewish Question, also know today as the Israel Question, with which both Smolars are all-too-familiar. Indeed, Smolar’s important new book should probably have been entitled: Bad Jew Grandfathers & Bad Jew Grandsons. Piotr Smolar is a French journalist of Polish origin. He is the senior correspondent for Le Monde in Washington, DC. After working in Moscow from 1997 to 2001, he published a book in French on Ru

Exactly 85 years ago today, on 3 September 1939, the Second World War officially began with Britain’s declaration of war against Germany. Russians might argue, however, the real war began on 22 June 1941 with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. While, for America, of course, the war began on December 7, 1941, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. World War Two was then, in a sense, three wars rolled into one featuring the alliance of Britain, the Soviet Union and America against the Axis. But this alliance, for the historian Giles Milton, was a short-term affair rather than a marriage which would inevitably disintegrate after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Indeed, in his interesting new book, The Stalin Affair, Milton describes it as an “impossible alliance” that might have “won” the war but would lose the peace and trigger the Cold War. GILES MILTON is the internationally best-selling author of twelve works of narrative history, including Nathaniel’s Nutmeg and Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfa

Controversial things are happening on the campus of the University of Austin (UATX), the brand new anti-woke university designed to “dare” its students to “think”. Last week, we interviewed UATX’s founding president, Pano Kanelos, who explained how he was trying to build what he called a 21st century “liberal university”. Today, in this KEEN ON America interview, we talk to Jacob Howland, UATX’s founding Provost, on what should be taught at this university. For some, of course, Howland’s focus on a 21st century anti-woke university education represents a new humanism; for others, it’s the last gasps of a reactionary 20th century intellectual elite. In either case, UATX is a provocative pedagogical experiment which we, at KEEN ON America, will be following as the new university opens its doors to students this month.JACOB HOWLAND is Provost, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Dean of Intellectual Foundations at the University of Austin. Previously he was McFarlin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus a